The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [44]
“Uhhhh,” Getz says, a noise Bigelow has heard from livestock, the kind of huff a horse makes when someone knees its belly to tighten up the girth, and Bigelow sits up on his elbows to watch as the shopkeeper pulls his own hair.
“Miriam!” he yells. “Mirr iii aammm.”
SHE LIVES WITH HER FATHER, above the store. When Bigelow pays a call on her, he has to pass Getz standing behind the counter, walk through an aisle of boxes and up eleven creaking stairs, at the top of which is a cramped windowless parlor furnished with a horsehide sofa and one ladder-back chair, a beveled mirror and a bank calendar, an upright piano with magazines and a metronome on its lid, a red wool carpet with a scorch mark on the edge near the wood stove. It’s a room that requires no chaperone, as Getz can see into it from the foot of the stairs, can hear whatever conversation might occur. Behind the sofa is a door, always closed, that presumably leads to other rooms, rooms where a person might relax.
On his third visit, following one afternoon spent listening and nodding to opera, another spent looking and nodding at photographs, Bigelow brings paper and a pen.
Why won’t you speak? he writes, hoping that if he, too, abandons his voice she might consent to a written exchange. But she reads the question, lifts her shoulders in an embarrassed hunch, and hands the paper back to him.
I enjoyed your singing at the shows. The pictures weren’t the same without you. I stopped going. Bigelow writes what he’s told her before, and she responds as she does to spoken compliments: she nods and she ducks her head, she dips her knees and plucks at the side of her skirt, all the movements together making an idiosyncratic little curtsy.
I know you can talk, he writes.
And the girl’s lips twitch, she winces, she shrugs, she puts her hands to her temples and then together before her chest, and then, after this series of seemingly petitionary gestures, she shakes her head.
Confused, Bigelow smiles. Would you rather I didn’t visit you? he asks, and she shakes her head. She takes the pen from his hand.
No, she writes, I like your company. Ink flows from the nib like her singing voice, a soprano kind of penmanship, Bigelow thinks, precise and pleasing, filled with points, loops, and dots.
But you won’t talk to me, he writes.
She holds the pen in her hand for a long while before answering. Not won’t, she writes, and she remains bent over the paper in her lap as if considering adding more, hunches over it for so long that he begins to worry that she is ill. But then she sits up, she hands him the page with just the two words.
“Yes, won’t,” Bigelow says out loud. And he says it again. “Won’t. You won’t talk.”
Miriam takes the paper and pen. I can’t, she writes.
“But I’ve—I’ve heard you.”
She nods. Sing, she writes on the paper.
“You sing but you don’t talk?”
She points at the word can’t.
“You sing but you can’t talk?”
“She stammers,” Getz says, and Bigelow looks up. The shopkeeper is standing at the top of the stairs, his hands in his pockets. His squint, his posture, the shine on his shoes, all convey not satisfaction, exactly. Vindication.
“She—” Bigelow begins.
“Stammers.”
Bigelow doesn’t speak but looks from one face to the other. Miriam smiles self-consciously; she tilts her head to one side and raises that shoulder: an apology. It’s already occurred to Bigelow that she is unusually adept at using gesture to convey meaning; now he sees that, of necessity, she has developed a talent for it. She’s wearing a white blouse with a black bow tied at the collar, the tops of its sleeves so voluminous they look empty. Leg-o’mutton, Bigelow remembers such sleeves are called. “So?” he finally says.
“No,” Getz says. “No. Not so. She stammers bad enough she can’t talk.”
“But I’ve heard—”
“You’ve heard her sing.” Getz looks at his daughter, who sits, hands clasped between her knees, in the middle of the slippery sofa. “Show him,” he says to her. “Let’s get it over and done with.”
Miriam shakes her head.
“Go on. Do what I